“You have nowhere to go.” The last line of George Lucas’s THX 1138 In the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a single alien visitor and his powerful robot land…
Category:
FILM & CINEMA
I got out my DVD of Meet John Doe after watching the “debate” between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. In the 1941 Frank Capra film a cynical newspaper reporter (Barbara Stanwyck) creates…
“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” [from John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 There are a lot of reasons not to…
Last week Hollywood released yet another Jodie Foster “vehicle.” Jodie is Hollywood’s favorite female victim, and Jodie the victim usually gets her revenge and sometimes an Oscar. Now that Charles…
In one of the early scenes of Ragtime (1981) a piano player watches pictures on a silent screen and causally fits his music to first a one-reeler and then some newsreels. A…
“Xu Lin just told me that he has shot himself and he is dead,” one of the observing students whispered in my ear. Xu Lin would not be returning…
It’s that time of the year again; time for Zu-Zu’s petals. But first, a few words on a related “seasonal” film; one that I haven’t seen tree dozen times,…
Just up the road a ways from where I am writing this there is a military courts martial in progress. Three Marines might be convicted of murdering an Iraqi…
It’s night, and the only illumination is from the glaring lights of the cars and hotrods convened on a high seaside bluff in Southern California. Buzz Gunderson, black, pomaded hair…
It is difficult to comment upon the latest Ridley Scott film, Kingdom of Heaven , without drifting off into what it implies about faith and religion and how it resonates with the…